Forget Mr Has Been. The prize is power

In St Petersburg, just after the 1917 Russian Revolution, a young woman called Maria Zakrevskaya had love affairs first with Robert Bruce Lockhart, the British spy who was the model for James Bond, then with the writer Maxim Gorky, with whom she bought Stalin an accordion for his birthday. A decade later, in London, she had an affair with H. G. Wells, the great Fabian scourge of the Liberal Party. For all her adult life, Zakrevskaya had to contend with rumours that she was a double agent.

Next week in Brighton her great- great-nephew, Nick Clegg, will have to persuade the Liberal Democrats that he is not doing the work of the Tories from within their party. A recent poll of members found that only…